Empower Your Frontline Employees: Watch Your Business Grow!

Customer service reps and sales reps are often regarded as the face of any organization, and for good reason. More often than not, any interaction between a business and its clients takes place through either of these touchpoints. Not only are these two domains responsible for ensuring high levels of customer satisfaction at all times, but also they are instrumental in advancing the growth of a business through client acquisition. This is especially true in case of the salespersons. As such, it is extremely important your customer support agents and sales people are highly motivated and functioning. How do you ensure this? Read on to know more!

Ensuring that your employees are well-motivated and well-equipped as well as running an efficient and a profitable business, combined with ensuring customer satisfaction is a delicate tight-rope balancing act. Simple reason: the budget is limited, and the number of customers to be serviced is huge. In order to walk a fine line between emphasizing on personal relationships and focusing on productivity, the answer may lie in the field of analytics. Analytics is a relatively new field which arms your employees with relevant data and valuable insights on the impact of customer serviceon your business.

In order to understand this better, let’s take the example of an electrician. Would you let him work on the appliances in your home or workplace without his tools? Obviously, the answer is no. Similarly, your customer service and sales representatives need proper tools and software to function to the best of their ability. Having good tools can enhance anyone’s performance. New technology can help you anticipate your customers’ needs, tailor business processes to best serve customers and improve the efficiency, which ultimately leads to reduction in costs.

John Wanamaker, a pioneer in marketing once remarked, “ I know half of my marketing dollars are wasted, I just don’t know which half.” Gone are the days when companies were blindly allocating arbitrary amounts of money to different campaigns. Marketing, and sales, have now evolved, and are more data-driven. Today, marketing is all about tracking leads, measuring Returns on Investment (ROI) and aiming for the most effective channel. And this is not even the whole picture! Sales is catching up, measuring the sales process, focusing on effective communication and nurturing leads accordingly. This has been made possible with the help of sales automation tools and B2b sales process is today generating tons of data and metadata.

How to harness this data effectively and use it for their advantage? Sales Analytics delivered via BI dashboards can be a vital operational tool providing critical insights into overall salesforce performance as well as individual salespeople. Analytics tools gives salespeople better insights into customers’ viewpoints. Analytics has positively impacted every step of the sales process. Right from being able to view the entire history of a customer interaction, determining the kind of strategies and clients that have generated maximum business, knowing what their client is most interested in, what their concerns are, to figuring out the best ways, and days to meet the clients, analytics helps sales reps figure it all out. What’s more, all this data is available to them in the form of a single dashboard, which can be viewed on their mobile phones on the field. This allows them to actually focus on their core job of selling instead of engaging in repetitive, administrative tasks. Analytics can take the basic prospect information like email address and name of the company, and fill in extra data about the company’s size, what industry they are belong to and other relevant facts which helps predict the likelihood of a prospective customer purchasing your product. The resultant digital revolution is creating a seismic shift in salesperson’s job.

A common layman tends to think that sales analytics is only concerned with sales volumes and whether the sales revenue targets are being met. But, this is just a part of the overall picture. Some other Key Performance Indicators (KPI) which analytics can give include: how discounts are given- and margins achieved- vary for different salespersons and customers, time taken to convert a lead into an order, pipeline generation by type of marketing activity etc. More importantly, with an organized set of up-to-date information available at the time and place of their choosing, sales reps can learn from each other by sharing metrics on what content is performing well and how well customers engage with different types and formats of content.

Analytics can also help in identifying the right time to engage with clients. For instance, it can be frustrating when we go into a shop only for to browse through some stuff on display, but when we make up our mind to purchase, the salesperson is nowhere to be seen. In the same way, any person who is just getting familiarized with your business and its offerings by going through some of the blogs might just not be ready to engage. Analytics, with its rich backlog of retrospective data that examines user behaviour patterns and other real-time attributes, gives salespeople more productive interactions with customers and boosting their conversion rate by selling to people who are actually looking to buy. Reaching out to the right people, at the right time can achieve the best outcome.

A sales and marketing team armed with up-to-date information derived from analytics will definitely achieve more and enhance the growth of the business, in a way that traditional methods just cannot match.